Engineering egress data considering pedestrians with reduced mobility

To quantify the evacuation process, evacuation practitioners use engineering egress data describing the occupant movement characteristics. These data are typically based to young and fit populations. However, the movement abilities of occupants who might be involved in evacuations are becoming more variable—with the building populations of today typically including increasing numbers of individuals: with impairments or who are otherwise elderly or generally less mobile. Thus, there will be an increasing proportion of building occupants with reduced ability to egress. For safe evacuation, there is therefore a need to provide valid engineering egress data considering pedestrians with disabilities. Gwynne and Boyce recently compiled a series of data sets related to the evacuation process to support practitioner activities in the chapter Engineering Data in the SFPE Handbook of Fire Protection Engineering. This paper supplements these data sets by providing information on and presenting data obtained from additional research related to the premovement and horizontal movement of participants with physical‐, cognitive‐, or age‐related disabilities. The aim is to provide an overview of currently available data sets related to, and key factors affecting the egress performance of, mixed ability populations which could be used to guide fire safety engineering decisions in the context of building design.     

DEM‐CFD modeling of particle systems with long‐range electrostatic interactions

To investigate dynamic behaviors of monocharged particle systems, a direct truncation (DT) method and a hybrid particle‐cell (HPC) method are implemented into the discrete element method coupled with computational fluid dynamics (DEM‐CFD) with defined cutoff distances. The DT method only considers electrostatic interactions between particles within the cutoff distance while the HPC method computes electrostatic interactions in the entire computational domain. The deposition process of monocharged particles in a container in air was simulated using the developed DEM‐CFD. It was found that using the DT method, the macrostructure, evolution of granular temperature, and radial distribution function of the particle system were sensitive to the specified cutoff distance. In contrast, using the HPC method, these results were independent of the specified cutoff distance, as expected. This implies that, although electrostatic interactions between particles with large separation distances are weak, they should be considered in DEM‐CFD for accurate modeling of charged particle systems. © 2015 The Authors AIChE Journal published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 61: 1792–1803, 2015     

Regional mass flux balancing for controlling gentle soil remediation operations

Extraction of heavy metals by accumulating plants is a method which is currently in development for the "gentle" remediation of contaminated agricultural soils (phytoremediation, see [2]). Areal contaminant mass flux balances are basic criteria for the design of such remediations and their control. A framework for the integration of contaminant balances relating the field scale of remediation with the regional scale of soil monitoring networks is provided by the recently developed method PROTERRA [3]. The objective of the study presented in this paper was to test the suitability of PROTERRA for planning and monitoring gentle soil remediations. For this purpose we applied the PROTERRA method to the contaminated agricultural land in and around Dornach, Switzerland, to assess copper flux balances.The calculations showed that atmospheric deposition and the application of pesticides and manure are important pathways for the inputs of copper. The copper export with a special maize cultivar accumulating heavy metals would be about three times higher than the average metal export with crops. A moderate increase of sewage sludge application would lead to a substantial increase of the copper input. Decisions to remediate the soil should take the uncertainty of mass flux balances both on field scale as well as on regional scale into account. Therefore, an important need of further development of the PROTERRA method is the integration of uncertainty analysis on both scales.     

The CEA test and other immunological tests as disease course controls in gastrointestinal adenocarcinoma

161 patients with adenocarcinoma of the gastrointestinal tract were studied to determine the value of the CEA test and a battery of non-specific immunological tests during the course of the disease. The ability of these tests to detect a tumor recurrence in radically operated patients was evaluated. A false negative preoperative CEA value was found in 40% of the patients with gastric carcinoma and 32% with colorectal carcinoma. Patients with a negative preoperative CEA value, and those with only slightly elevated values, had a distinctly better prognosis regarding initial operability and tendency to postoperative recurrence than patients with primarily markedly elevated values. With few exceptions, the development of distant metastases was detected earlier and more easily with the CEA test than by the usual routine follow-up methods. However, in the event of isolated local recurrence the CEA test was positive in only 1 of 5 patients. This reflects the direct correlation between tumor size and CEA elevation. The CEA test is a valuable supplement in the follow-up of patients with gastrointestinal carcinoma.     

上罗拉皮圈对环锭纺的影响

上罗拉皮圈是复杂的纺线生产流程中一个很小的细节。然而,由于它们对成纱质量有较大影响,必须对它们进行优先考虑。质量不是一个简单的问题,它包括多个方面（橡胶质量、正确的加工、定期的保养）。因此,皮圈的选择就像保养操作的自动化程度一样影响成本产生。本文将就这个问题进行讨论。     

Estimation in the Mixture Transition Distribution Model

This paper introduces a new iterative algorithm for the estimation of the mixture transition distribution (MTD) model, which does not require the use of any specific external optimization procedure and can therefore be programmed in any computing language. Comparisons with previously published results show that this new algorithm performs at least as well as or better than other methods. The choice of initial values is also discussed.
The MTD model was designed for the modeling of high-order Markov chains and has already proved to be a useful tool for the analysis of different types of time series such as wind speeds and social relationships. In this paper, we also propose to use it for the modeling of one-dimensional spatial data. An application using a DNA sequence shows that this approach can lead to better results than the classical Potts model.     

Indexing the solution space: a new technique for nearest neighborsearch in high-dimensional space

Similarity search in multimedia databases requires an efficient support of nearest-neighbor search on a large set of high-dimensional points as a basic operation for query processing. As recent theoretical results show, state of the art approaches to nearest-neighbor search are not efficient in higher dimensions. In our new approach, we therefore precompute the result of any nearest-neighbor search which corresponds to a computation of the Voronoi cell of each data point. In a second step, we store conservative approximations of the Voronoi cells in an index structure efficient for high-dimensional data spaces. As a result, nearest neighbor search corresponds to a simple point query on the index structure. Although our technique is based on a precomputation of the solution space, it is dynamic, i.e., it supports insertions of new data points. An extensive experimental evaluation of our technique demonstrates the high efficiency for uniformly distributed as well as real data. We obtained a significant reduction of the search time compared to nearest neighbor search in other index structures such as the X-tree